abandonware games sorted by popularity

Terminal Velocity is all about speed, freedom, and blowing things up while flying at ridiculous velocities. The open environments give a sense of scale rarely seen at the time, and...

Xtrek is a multiplayer-focused space simulation that captures the spirit of cooperative and competitive gameplay long before it became mainstream. Players pilot ships, complete obj...

Beyond Columns is what happens when someone looks at Tetris and says, “What if we made it... slightly fancier?” This match-three puzzle game involves dropping shiny col...

Crisis in the Kremlin lets you step into the shoes of a Soviet leader during the late 1980s, facing the impossible task of guiding the USSR through economic collapse, political unr...

Released in 1983 for DOS, Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator is what happens when early arcade design meets Federation bureaucracy. Vector-style graphics make you feel like ...

Mini Putt brings the simple pleasures of miniature golf to the computer, offering colorful courses filled with ramps, obstacles, tricky angles, and holes that seem much farther awa...

Knight Orc (1987, DOS/Mac) flips the fantasy script: you’re not the hero, you’re the orc. Tired of being slaughtered by noble knights, you decide it’s payback tim...

Imagine Tetris went on a sugar binge and had an identity crisis. That’s Zyconix (1992, DOS) in a nutshell. It’s a tile-matching puzzle game where nothing quite behaves ...

In Druglord, you’re back on the mean streets, older, wiser, and with slightly better ASCII. Think of it as Drug Wars’s bigger, nastier cousin. You start broke, deal wit...

Aka Starglider 2 with an attitude, Revenge of Defender (or Defender of the Crown’s evil twin in name only) is a 3D space shooter where your main enemy is not the aliens&mdash...

Side Arms: Hyper Dyne is a side-scrolling shoot-'em-up arcade game developed and published by Capcom in 1986 and later ported on various platforms. Players control a "mobilsui...

Industrial machinery might not sound thrilling, yet Magnetic Crane transforms operating a giant crane into a surprisingly engaging puzzle experience. Your task is to move cargo eff...

In this 1987 DOS game, you delve into a dungeon filled with traps and monsters. Solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and uncover the secrets of the forge. It's like playing Dungeons &...

Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor (1997, Windows XP) took the RTS formula and flipped it into a weird deathmatch where you control a single unit and try not to die... horribly. ...

Gnome Ranger feels like the kind of game that was designed by someone who really loved puzzles but maybe didn’t love explaining them. You control a gnome (clearly a recurring...

With a title like Pray for Death, you know you’re not signing up for a cheerful platformer. This is a fighting game with a gothic, heavy-metal aesthetic that screams 1996. It...

Ah, Black Sect (1993), where the puzzles are cryptic, the villagers are creepy, and the atmosphere is so thick you could spread it on toast. A classic first-person point-and-click ...

Donald’s Alphabet Chase is the video game equivalent of hiding fridge magnets and watching a duck hunt them down. In this 1988 edutainment title, the mischievous alphabet let...